Crap. I spilled toxic waste on my keyboard again.

I’ve always wondered who made these in-house Nintendo promos/ads for Nintendo Power magazine. Most of them were fairly well done over the years. This vivid promo, featuring Nintendo’s early website in 1995, is probably one of my favorites. It also mentions AOL (keyword “NOA”), of course, which was still a big online player at the time.

By the way, anyone who can convincingly explain (with in-world fiction, not marketing) the presence of a poison/toxic waste barrel on this kid’s desk wins 10 cocoa points. Even Diddy Kong sitting there makes more sense.

[Update: 02/01/2016 – It turns out that the toxic waste barrel is actually a boss character named Dumb Drum from Donkey Kong Country. Special thanks to etranist for pointing that out in the comments. ]

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the first video game website you ever looked at online?

The only time I have ever read the term “MUSH” in print.

You are looking at a scan of the actual newspaper ad that got me on the Internet with a commercial ISP for the first time. (Prior to that, I got online through a free dial-up university dataswitch.) It’s an ad for NandO.net, a 1990s-era Raleigh, NC-based ISP originally owned and operated by our flagship newspaper, The News and Observer.

As you can see by the handwritten notes on the ad, my dad used this actual piece of paper to sign us up for an account on the service (I modified the credit card number digitally, in case anyone is wondering). I found this rare artifact in my old computer papers recently while researching my early web history for a FastCompany piece I wrote last year. In that article, I explored what it was like to build a website in 1995. Here’s what I wrote about NandO:

As the Internet became more than just a way to access MUDs or look up the occasional novelty on text-based Gophers or web browsers, both of us sought a more robust way of accessing it. One of the first ISPs in our city was called NandO.net. Our local newspaper, the News and Observer, ran it as an extension of its efforts to pioneer online newsmaking processes.

On some day in late 1994, my father signed my family up for NandO.net. What we got in exchange for about $20 a month was an account on an Internet-enabled BBS, which had its own local message board and games, but would allow us to use text-only Internet email, web browsing, FTP, and Gopher. My dad paid extra for a “shell account” so I could log in and get a Unix command prompt. From there I could upload and download files from a terminal program, telnet to other servers, and push stuff from my shell account to remote machines via FTP.

What heady days those were. Incredible to think that I was just dipping my toes into what would eventually become a life-changing deluge — not just for me, but for all of humanity itself.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What was the name of your first ISP? What year did you first use it?

The NFL really needs to do something about these bone-crunching incidents

People seem to be talking about football a lot these days, and I’m not quite sure why. To appease the raving hordes, I thought I’d throw out a Football retro scan. In this case, it’s for Super High Impact on the Sega Genesis.

I’ve never been a fan of Football video games in general — my favorite is probably still Tecmo Bowl for the NES. Nostalgia for that game’s intro music alone is enough to get me to play it a couple times a year.

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your all-time favorite American football video game from the pre-32-bit era?

click on the image above to see front and back

I’ve previously featured a scan of an AOL CD, but so far I have not ventured into the world of America Online floppy disk packaging…until now. Here is a gaming-centric AOL giveaway disk package — still unopened — which I believe came with an issue of GamePro magazine I received as part of a subscription in 1996.

I love the AOL screenshot printed on the package here (possibly mocked up for marketing purposes) because it offers a rare glimpse into the mid-1990s AOL interface (with a Windows 3.1 window motif), centered on “The Games Channel.” If anybody has a collection of AOL screenshots from the 1990s, I’d love to see them.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you ever play games on America Online back in the day? Tell us about it.

Beware the tiny red man

Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s the best non-Ultima game Origin ever made?

A Christmas Tree in the Window

Back in the day, my dad bought a KoalaPad drawing tablet for our Atari 800. Perhaps that very December — in 1984 or 1985, he drew this scene of the front of our house at Christmas time, complete with a view of our Christmas tree through our living room window. So proud was he of his creation that he snapped a photo of it with a Polaroid camera, and that’s the print I am showing to you now.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you draw any Christmas art on your computer when you were a kid? Tell us about it.

“There’s More to Life On-Line”

Just a few months ago, the 20th anniversary of the launch of WorldsAway, a pioneering graphical online world, came and went without any major notice (it launched in September 1995). But I remembered the milestone, and I wrote a recent This Old Tech column over on PCWorld.com about my memories of the service, which I stuck with in some form or another until 2001.

WorldsAway was simply magical when it launched. It promised to put you, as a user, into a graphical world that you could share with other online users (the term “Avatar” as an online representation of your physical self came from the creators of this lineage of online worlds). It delivered on that goal with a charming atmosphere — where you could change between whimsical heads with ease — and a vibrant community that I still look back on fondly to this day.

Honestly, I miss being part of that WorldsAway community. My involvement there came at a time when I was fairly lonely and isolated with my hobbies — my high school years — during a time when few “average” people used any online service whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong; I did fairly well at school, and I wasn’t a freak with no friends — but the real-life friends I did have did not share my love for the online world. Online, of course, I could find others like me, and on WorldsAway, we all celebrated that commonality together in a vibrant, playful world.

Did anybody else use WorldsAway in the 1990s? I’d love to hear from you.

P.S. I was an avid reader and subscriber of CompuServe Magazine in the 1990s, which is where I found and drooled over this ad back in the day.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you use any graphical online chat worlds in the 1990s? Tell us about it.

Jingle disk, jingle disk, jingle all the way

Throughout the ages, fans of Christmas have found new and varied ways to express their love for the holiday. In the 1980s, personal computer users joined in the fun, using their machines to host a new breed of animated Christmas greetings that were distributed through magazines, BBSes, or even sold on disk like Thoughtware’s JingleDisk, seen here.

Upon inserting JingleDisk into your Commodore 64 or Apple II computer (It’s a double-sided disk with data for the different platforms on each side) and booting it up, the user is presented with a Christmas-themed animation set to various holiday musical standards. It’s fun to watch.

There is something about the warmth of the glow from a cathode ray tube screen that lends itself well to computerized Christmas celebrations — perhaps it echoes some primal link to prehistoric man sitting around the fire telling stories.

By the way, this JingleDisk came to me by way of a family friend who just turned 40 years old today. Happy Birthday, Chris!

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever programmed a Christmas-themed demo or sent a computerized Christmas card? Tell us about it.

I need to start a historical coupon collection

Apparently I ripped this Tiger Game.com $10 rebate coupon off the back of some unknown cereal box around 1997 or 1998. I found it recently in the papers cleaned out from my childhood desk.

The Tiger Game.com seemed like a neat machine when I first read about it — with its touch screen and potential for “Internet access” — but it ended up being a major let-down.

I did eventually get a Game.Com — I could have sworn I got it on clearance at K-Mart or Toys’R’Us (but I didn’t mention that in this earlier post)…or maybe it was a birthday present from my dad in 1998. Despite buying many Game.com games over the next few years on clearance, I pretty much only played the built-in Solitaire game on it. But that was fun enough.

I remember thinking something along the lines of “For the price I paid for it, it’s a pretty good solitaire machine.” So maybe I did get my first Game.com on clearance. It’s sad that my memory is fading like this. I can typically remember how and when I got everything in my collection. I will have to look through my papers later and see if I have a receipt for it. That could shed some light on things.

See my previous Retro Scan posts about the Game.com (listed below) for more of my stories about this odd console. It’s the only video game console I ever used to call a BBS. Now that’s odd.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Did you buy a Tiger Game.Com in the 1990s? What did you think about it?

—
See Also:
Tiger Game.com (RSOTW, 2010)
Game.com Internet Module (RSOTW, 2012)

A family on the move

This Apple II-clone machine became popular in the mid-late 1980s as a low-cost alternative to the Apple IIc (almost half the price but twice the RAM — scratch that, Apple IIc had 128K too), especially for home use. I have a Laser 128 in nearly pristine condition in the box, and it feels nice to use. It echoes the integrated form factor of the IIc, which makes it convenient to setup in a pinch if you need to pull out an Apple II in an emergency. Or at least that’s how I use it.

Discussion Topic of the Week: Do you have any Thanksgiving computer or gaming traditions? Tell us about them.